Public Diplomacy: Lessons From The Past

10Public Diplomacy—Executive Summary—Public Diplomacy: Lessons from the PastNicholas J. CullPublic Diplomacy is a term much used but seldom subjected torigorous analysis. This report provides succinct definitions for the corevocabulary of contemporary public diplomacy including ‘The NewPublic Diplomacy’ and ‘Soft Power.’ It sets out a simple taxonomyof public diplomacy’s components, their relationship one to anotherand their respective sources of credibility. These components are:1) Listening (the foundation for all effective public diplomacy); 2)Advocacy; 3) Cultural Diplomacy; 4) Exchange; 5) InternationalBroadcasting. The report also identifies 6) Psychological Warfare asa parallel activity that shares some key features of public diplomacy,but which has to be administered beyond a rigidly maintainedfirewall. The central implication of this analysis is to underscore theessential wisdom of the present U.K. structure of Public Diplomacy,and also to highlight the need for these elements to be balancedwithin a Public Diplomacy bureaucracy rather than mired in mutualinfighting and a scramble for resources and dominance.The main body of the report examines successful uses of eachindividual component of public diplomacy drawing from the historyof U.S., Franco-German, Swiss and British diplomatic practice.Each case is set out with a scenario section giving background tothe problem, a narrative of the campaign and an analysis of thereasons for its success and the implications of that success. Thecases considered are: the role of systematic foreign public opinionresearch in the re-branding of Switzerland since 2000; U.S. PublicDiplomacy to support Intermediate Nuclear Force deployment in

Lessons from the Past11Europe in 1983; U.S. use of the Family of Man photographic exhibitaround the world during the years 1955–1963; the role of exchangesin the Franco-German rapprochement, 1945–1988; and the role ofinternational broadcasting in British management of U.S. isolationbetween 1939 and 1941.The report continues by examining five classic cases of failurein public diplomacy across the taxonomy arising chiefly from adiscrepancy between rhetoric and reality: failure to listen in theU.S. ‘Shared Values’ campaign of 2001/2; the failure of advocacy inVietnam; the long-term failure of Soviet cultural diplomacy; the caseof Sayed Qutb and the failure of exchange diplomacy; and counterproductive results of Free French broadcasting during the SecondWorld War. The author notes that the worst error is to wholly neglectpublic diplomacy altogether.The final section applies the author’s taxonomy to the challengesof contemporary Public Diplomacy, and places especial emphasison the need to conceptualize the task of the public diplomat as thatof the creator and disseminator of ‘memes’ (ideas capable of beingspread from one person to another across a social network) and as acreator and facilitator of networks and relationships.The report concludes with a recommendation that a larger scaleproject be initiated to continue with the work begun in this reportand gather past experience in PD practice from around the world intoa ‘Public Diplomacy playbook’ as a mechanism to develop capacityat home and build the voices of those we wish to empower.Nicholas J. CullLos Angeles, April 2007

12Public Diplomacy1. Definitions1.1 Diplomacy, Traditional Diplomacy and PublicDiplomacyThis author defines diplomacy as the mechanisms short of wardeployed by an international actor to manage the internationalenvironment. Today, this actor may be a state, multi-national corporation, non-governmental organization, international organization,terrorist organization/stateless paramilitary organization or otherplayer on the world stage; traditional diplomacy is internationalactor’s attempt to manage the international environment throughengagement with another international actor; public diplomacy isan international actor’s attempt to manage the international environment through engagement with a foreign public.1Historically PD has taken the form of contact between onegovernment and the people of another state. PD does not alwaysseek its mass audience directly. Often it has cultivated individualswithin the target audience who are themselves influential in thewider community. Moreover, PD does not always take the form ofan immediate attempt to influence a foreign public. It is also partof public diplomacy to listen to a foreign public and change yourapproach or even your high policy as a result. Similarly the contactneed not be related to the image of the international actor, it mightbe the promotion of an idea (such as international cooperation onclimate change) which the actor considers an important element inforeign policy. In all cases the method is some form of engagementwith a foreign public and the aim is the same—the management ofthe international environment.1.2 The New Public DiplomacyScholars now speak of the New Public Diplomacy.2 This termis compatible within the definition above but also draws attentionto key shifts in the practice of public diplomacy. These are: 1) the

Lessons from the Past13international actors are increasingly non-traditional and NGOs areespecially prominent; 2) the mechanisms used by these actors tocommunicate with world publics have moved into new, real-timeand global technologies (especially the Internet); 3) these newtechnologies have blurred the formerly rigid lines between thedomestic and international news spheres; 4) in place of old conceptsof propaganda Public Diplomacy makes increasing use of conceptson one hand explicitly derived from marketing—especially placeand nation branding—and on the other hand concepts growing fromnetwork communication theory; hence, there is 5) a new terminologyof PD as the language of prestige and international image hasgiven way to talk of ‘soft power’ and ‘branding;’ 6) perhaps mostsignificantly, the New Public Diplomacy speaks of a departure fromthe actor-to-people Cold War-era communication and the arrival of anew emphasis on people-to-people contact for mutual enlightenment,with the international actor playing the role of facilitator; and 7) inthis model the old emphasis on top down messaging is eclipsedand the prime task of the new public diplomacy is characterizedas ‘relationship building.’ The relationships need not be betweenthe actor and a foreign audience but could usefully be between twoaudiences, foreign to each other, whose communication the actorwishes to facilitate. Again, as the following grid will show, the aimof managing the international environment remains consistent.

14Public Diplomacy1. Fig. 1. The Old Public Diplomacy and the NewDominant CharacteristicsOld PDNew PD1) Identity of international actorStateState and non-state2) Tech. environmentShort wave radioPrint newspapersLand-line telephonesSatellite, Internet,real-time newsMobile telephones3) Media environmentClear line betweendomestic and international news sphereBlurring of domesticand international newssphere.4) Source of approachOutgrowth ofpolitical advocacy &propaganda theoryOutgrowth ofcorporate branding &network theory5) Terminology“International image”“Prestige”“Soft power”“Nation Brand”6) Structure of roleTop down, actor toforeign peoplesHorizontal, facilitatedby actor7) Nature of roleTargeted messagingRelationship-building8) Overall aimThe managementof the internationalenvironmentThe managementof the internationalenvironmentOne unresolved issue of the New Public Diplomacy is therelationship between the output of the new players and the interestof the state. Some national governments have tended to look onNGOs, IOs and corporations with active voices overseas as unpaidauxiliaries of their state PD effort. This misses the extent to whichthese newcomers are international actors in their own right, and theirPD represents their attempt to manage the international environmentthrough public outreach in their own interests rather than the interestsof the state to which they have been historically connected. Statesmay find that their relations with these new players will be less likerelations with their own internal PD organs and more like dealingswith allied states with overlapping ideological interests, who can beexpected to part company when a conflict of interest arrives.

Lessons from the Past151.3 Soft PowerA key feature of the New Public Diplomacy has been the riseof the term ‘Soft Power’, as coined by Joseph Nye at the end of theCold War, as an expression of the ability of an actor to get what itwants in the international environment because of the attractivenessof its culture rather than military or economic leverage.3 PD can bethe mechanism to deploy soft power, but it is not the same thing assoft power, any more than the army and hard power are the samething. It is possible for an international actor to have PD and notSoft Power (like North Korea) or Soft Power and minimal PD (likeEire).The advantage of the term ‘Soft Power’ is that it has movedthe conversation around PD into the realm of national security andprovided a language for arguing that attention be paid to PD. Thedisadvantage is that Nye has presented it a mechanism for ‘gettingwhat one wants.’ The idea of a state entering into each internationalconversation purely to get what it wants makes excellent strategicsense but it is certainly not attractive, rather it is repulsive: negativesoft power. Listening and being open to being changed by anencounter is attractive. Hence, paradoxically too much publicfocus on soft power can actually diminish an actor’s soft power. Anexample of this was Secretary of State Powell’s remarks followingthe Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 2005 that American aid forstricken countries would be good for U.S. public diplomacy.Soft Power is increasingly seen as a dated concept. U.S. analystsincluding Ernest J. Wilson III and Nye himself now speak of adynamic combination of hard power and soft power in which PDinforms policy making, which has been dubbed ‘Smart Power.’ Aninvestigation of the concept of Smart Power co-chaired by Nyeand Richard Armitage at the Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies appeared in early 2008.4

16Public Diplomacy1.4 The Foreign & Commonwealth Office Definition of PDIn 2005 Lord Cole’s review of British public diplomacydefined PD as ‘work aiming to inform and engage individualsand organizations overseas in order to improve understandingof and strengthen influence for the United Kingdom in a mannerconsistent with governmental medium and long-term goals.’5 Thekey component here was the definition’s emphasis on the use of PDto serve policy goals. Today the FCO Public Diplomacy Group hasan even more succinct working definition of public diplomacy as‘the process of achieving the U.K.’s International Strategic Prioritiesthrough engagement with the public overseas.’6Under this definition the generation of strategic prioritiesbecomes a key process. It should not be expected that each elementwithin the public diplomacy apparatus should take an equal role inrealizing every single priority. The British Council, for example, ismore suited to serving an objective of engagement with the Islamicworld as part of a counter-terrorist policy than assisting in combatingillegal migration. But each element, nonetheless, has a role toplay—within the limits of its respective editorial or operationalindependence—and none should be considered exempt. The idealsituation would see a coming together of policy and apparatus withtasks that suit the timescale and approach of the PD actor in question.A policy which cannot be helped by the ethical journalism approachof the BBC World Service or two-way cultural engagement andrelationship building of the British Council needs rethinking. By thesame token the Treasury should question why revenues should bespent on activity which cannot be linked to foreign policy objectives.Listeners are being informed and relationships being built for a reason.An awareness of policies—or the terms of this author’s definition:the priorities for the management of the international environment—is a precondition for effective public diplomacy. This said theterm ‘engagement’ within the definition is also significant. Effectiveengagement requires listening and feeding back, hence the apparatus

Lessons from the Past17of public diplomacy and especially its listening elements shouldhave a key role to play in defining and shaping the policies they willbe called upon to deliver.2. The Evolution of PD as a Concept and its Core ApproachesThe term Public Diplomacy was first applied to the process ofinternational information and cultural relations in 1965 by EdmundGullion, a retiredAmerican diplomat turned dean of the Fletcher Schoolof Diplomacy at Tufts University near Boston. It took immediatehold in the United States for three reasons. First, America neededa benign alternative to terms like propaganda and psychologicalwarfare to allow a clearer distinction between its own democraticinformation practices and the policies pursued by the Soviet Union.Second, America’s international information bureaucracy—theUnited States Information Agency (1953–1999)—welcomed a termthat gave them the status of diplomats (at the time of coining theydid not enjoy the status of full Foreign Service career officers).Third, as the term implied a single concept of a nation’s approach tointernational opinion, so it contained within it an implicit argumentfor a centralization of the mechanisms of public diplomacy. USIAused the term to argue for continued dominion over Voice of Americaradio and to justify its absorption of the rump of cultural work stillheld by the State Department. This was accomplished in 1978.Despite its increasing use in the U.S., the term made littleheadway in the international scene until the years immediatelyfollowing the Cold War, when the challenges of real-time televisionnews, the emerging Internet and the obvious role of ideas in thepolitical changes sweeping Eastern Europe convinced key westernplayers that image making and information had a new relevance ininternational relations. Numerous bureaucracies, including Britain’s,adopted the terminology of public diplomacy. This said, the relativeyouth of the term belies the antiquity of its constituent parts, most ofwhich are as old as statecraft.

18Public Diplomacy2.1 ListeningWhile most of the elements of PD are presented here in noparticular order, the choice of the first is deliberate, for it precedesall successful public diplomacy: Listening. Listening is an actor’sattempt to manage the international environment by collectingand collating data about publics and their opinions overseas andusing that data to redirect its policy or its wider public diplomacyapproach accordingly. This has traditionally been an element of eachconstituent practice of public diplomacy, with advocacy, culturaldiplomacy, exchange and broadcasting agencies each attending totheir own audience and opinion research. Information on foreignpublic opinion has also been gathered as part of the regular functionof conventional diplomacy and intelligence work. In its most basicform this covers an event whereby an international actor seeksout a foreign audience and engages them by listening rather thanby speaking, a phenomenon which is much promised but seldomperformed. It is common to see public diplomacy responding toshifts in international opinion; cases of listening or structuredopinion monitoring shaping the highest levels of policy are harder tofind. The holy grail of public diplomats is to be, in the famous wordsof USIA director Edward R. Murrow, ‘in on the take-offs’ of policyrather than just ‘the crash landings.’ While systematic assessmentsof foreign opinion are modern, the state of a neighbour’s moralehas been a feature of intelligence reports as long as there have beenspies.7 No state has made responding to international opinion centralto its diplomacy or even its public diplomacy, but Switzerland hasmade some interesting experiments in the field.2.2 AdvocacyAdvocacy in Public Diplomacy may be defined as an actor’sattempt to manage the international environment by undertaking aninternational communication activity to actively promote a particularpolicy, idea or that actor’s general interests in the minds of a foreign

Lessons from the Past19public. Today this includes embassy press relations (frequentlythe hard end of policy promotion) and informational work (whichcan be somewhat softer and less angled to hard and fast policygoals). Elements of advocacy are to be found in all areas of PD,and its short-term utility has, historically, led to a bias towards thisdimension of PD and a tendency to place it, and the elements of thebureaucracy most closely connected to it, at the center of any PDstructure. The unique features of the other fields of PD have led toan almost universal centrifugal force within all PD bureaucracies asthey strain to be free of the ‘taint of policy.’Ancient examples of advocacy may be found in Herodotuswhere envoys from Xerxes of Persia appeal to the people of Argosfor their neutrality in the Empire’s invasion of Greece in 480 BC.8While advocacy is common to all states, it is a dominant conceptin American public diplomacy, where each element is scrutinizedduring congressional oversight for its contribution to selling the ideaof America.2.3 Cultural DiplomacyCultural diplomacy may be defined as an actor’s attempt to managethe international environment through making its cultural resourcesand achievements known overseas and/or facilitating culturaltransmission abroad. This work often overlaps with exchanges,and hence the two have been often housed together though seldomhappily. Historically Cultural Diplomacy has meant a country’spolicy to facilitate the export of examples of its culture. Today thisincludes the work of organizations like the British Council or ItalianCultural Institute. Ancient examples include the Greek constructionof the great library at Alexandria, the Roman Republic’s policyinviting the sons of ‘friendly kings’ from their borders to be educatedin Rome, and the Byzantine Empire’s sponsorship of Orthodoxevangelism across the Slavic lands. Discomfort with advocacy rolesand overt diplomatic objectives have led some Cultural Diplomacyorg

2. The Evolution of PD as a Concept and its Core Approaches 17 2.1 Listening 18 2.2 Advocacy 18 2.3 Cultural Diplomacy 19 2.4 Exchange 20 2.5 International Broadcasting 21 2.6 Psychological Warfare 22 3. Three Taxonomies of PD 24 3. Fig. 1. Basic Taxonomy of Public Diplomacy & P